Years of satanic number crunching at my local train company appear to have finally yielded a system that enables them to deploy the absolute minimum of carriages no matter what time of day it is. So, off-peak travel – once one of the great perks of self employment – is now just a grotesque and scaled-down, Fisher-Price rush hour. The torment of others, which might ordinarily have been confined to an avoidable area, now closes in from every side.

Woman 1 (to my right, "waking up" having feigned sleep to stop people trying to sit next to her) "Give us that mag."

Woman 2 (opposite her, defending her own space with a bottle of partially drunk cola and a crescent of low-rent magazines, one of which she passed over) "That had me laughing out loud."

Woman 3 (directly opposite-reading from a paper to a husband who made faces but never replied) "That zero-carbon housing development is going ahead."

Man 1 (behind me - talking into his phone) "Theo! Theo! It's Mark. I've been in Sweden … and Hamburg … I'm on the train … I think the problem is with the gearboxes … yeah, it's a bad signal …"

Woman 2 "Did I tell you what happened at work? I only had the key for the top lock, and I asked her for the key to the bottom lock and she give me a load of grief."